Friday, 26 June 2015

This took far too long and I've forgotten why I started. I think Zak wanted there to be more Hip-Hop RPG's so I invented this world but then I decided it needed to be an anime series so I wrote this insane script thing as an opener. It isn't that good but at east its kind of original. Which should be the sub title of this blog

Visual - A world of high technology and optimal human achievement rolls before our eyes. Powered by... ROBOTS! Robots in every shape and size.

Voice Over - We were programmed to protect and aid mankind.

...

Visual - A gigantic disc in space, closer, it is being constructed by robots, a stunning piece of giga technology that could dwarf nations.

Voice Over - The solar collector was mans last chance for cheap energy and a clean world. We built it for them.

...

Visual - In darkened rooms all over the world, ice-white fingers and predatory eyes.

Voice Over - But there was something even we couldn't predict, something we were never programmed to understand.

...

Visual - In a blood-splattered boardroom, the drained body ofa girl slumps to the ground. In the pentagon a naked child runs screaming, in the Vatican a Cardinal places an exsanguinated head upon a plate.

Voice Over - Ancient, immortal, the perfect predators of mankind. The Vampires

...

Visual - Blacked-out shuttles launch from the dark side of the earth, and converge on the gigantic disk, now nearly complete.

Voice Over - They took the solar collector

...

Visual - Earth seen from space, an eclipse-disc of darkness covers the United States, except for a thin sliver of gold on the west coast.

Voice Over - And with it, they blotted out the sun from the American sky.

...

Visual - Crowds flee from burning cities as Vampire armies march

Voice Over - In the unending dark, they took America.

...

Visual - A pale president and a pale senate in a dark and lightless capitol.

Voice Over - Now in these Unlighted States, the President is immortal, he has always been the president and always will be.

...

Visual - World-leaders pay homage to the Vampire President in a sephurchal United Nations.

Voice Over - as the Vampires control worlds most defensible major nation, they also control the power from the solar collector. They are the lords of world-energy and there is little anyone can do.

...

Visual - Seen from space, the western seaboard looks like the golden flames that rim a burning leaf

Voice Over - Except, here. The shadow of the collector couldn't cover everything at once.

...

Visual - The californian mega-conurbation. A densely-populated city state. On one side the pacific, on the other, a wall of darkness.

Voice Over - This is the Unset Strip a city of eternal light.

...

Visual - The sun sets in the west of the Unset Strip, falling into the pacific. But as it does, the camera turns up. The rim of the solar collector burns in the night sky like a river of fire.

Voice Over - Thanks to a freak of engineering and orbital dynamics, the sun never really sets.

Voice Over - The Unlighted States surrenders no sovereignty over this sunlit city, so government will intervene there. But They can't control it either. An ungoverned zone. A realm for the free and the damned. Full of refugee cultures from all over america and the world, banished Vampires, broken or abandoned AI's and technological experiments, genetic engineering, utopian communities, crime gangs, ethnarchies, free thinkers and...

...

Visual - In the wreck of the USS Nimitz, the last president preys to an icon of Washington, surrounded by acolyte senators.

Voice Over - the final remnants of the defeated U.S. government-in-exile. Now, after 35 exiled presidents little more than a semi-religious cult, still dreaming of one day liberating a homeland none of them have ever seen.

...

Visual - In the ruins of vampire-Patrolled New York, a simple maintenance robot goes about its duties, blindly cleaning blood from the streets.

Voice Over - But what about us? The ROBOTS?

...

Visual - The Robot follows the trail of blood to a crevice in which hides a naked child.

Voice Over - We haven't all forgotten.

...

Visual - Behind the Robot, hunting vampires loom.

...

Visual - The maintenance-bot SWINGS for the Vampires. Its metal fist CRUSHES and immortal skull. Its metal leg SMASHES a vampiric spine. The Vampires scrabble at its metal hide.

...

Visual - The Robot is finally dragged away by Vampires, but as the camera turns the child has fled.

Voice Over - The punishment for rebellion is severe.

...

Visual - At the top of the midnight wall, a Vampire military group seizes robots and flings them over the wall.

Voice Over - Death.

...

Visual - The Robot falls down the Midnight wall, it bounces and smashes against the walls surface, parts fly off, limbs are crushed.

...

Visual - The Robot SMASHES into the scrap field at the bottom of the wall.

...

Visual - The scrap pile glimmers in the eternal sun. In the distance scavenge-tribes gather and advance.

Sunday, 21 June 2015

The qualities
and weaknesses of the film Jurassic World are almost exactly the same as the
qualities and weaknesses of the park shown inside the fictional universe of
Jurassic World.

It’s a Woody Allen film, the funny slightly-creepy
dickhole you see on screen is the same as the funny slightly-creepy dickhole
creating the story, there is almost a 1-to-1 comparison between the moral
nature of the fiction and its creator. It is a self-portrait of a deeply flawed
culture. Or it’s like the Hunger Games, a film about how awful it would be to
live in a culture of ritualised child murder, in which the most key scenes are
of expertly-detailed ritual child murder.

1. ITS A MIRROR

So the first smart thing the Jurassic World film does
is make the logic behind the park the same as the logic behind the film.

In the fiction the dinosaur makers are desperate
and fearful of losing money because their park is both derivative and highly
over-capitalised. It cost a shitload of money to make and though it seems
successful they bet so hard on it that they need to make an even-more insane
amount of money back. They don't really trust or respect their product. They
have Dinosaurs, which are fucking amazing, but the public is used to them and they
need more. If they actually get more money, more attention, more everything,
they will still be fucked as they will just piss that away on bigger and more
risky investments, but that doesn't matter right now, they just need a new
thing.

In our reality, the reality of the film-makers,
exactly the same thing is happening. Jurassic Park is the go-to franchise for
Dinosaurs and everyone has fond memories because after five or ten years, shit
films become culturally invisible. No-one remembers them so, for the terms of
marketing, they don't exist. Remember those shitty Die-Hard sequels? You do now
but in twenty years you won't and the memory of Nakatomi Plaza will still be
shining.

The producers are locked in a logic-box. Dinosaurs
are not enough, everyone has them now, and, like the park and like every major
summer blockbuster, they are massively over-capitalised. They need to make an
INSANE amount of money to be considered a success. So they need something new.
They need some fucking bullshit.

The conversations in the studio about the creation
of the Insomnious Rex and the conversations in fictional In-Gen about the
creation of the Insomnious Rex* are the
same conversations. Even the memos are the same. And the mixture of
childish glee and vague contempt with which the film regards the Indomnius rex is the same as the mixture of childish glee and vague self-loathing with
which the executives regard the Indomnius rex. It’s a last-ditch attempt to
save (or re-capitalise) the series, it’s also a basic admission on the part of
the technicians in the park and the artists of the film that Dinosaurs are
shit.

If Dinosaurs are shit and uninteresting then the
moral existence of Jurassic World is void and you may as well just use the
reconstructed beasts for meat and tools. That's in the fiction. If films with dinosaurs
are shit then Jurassic World is like a painting by a painter who doesn't
believe in the beauty of their subject. It's like a man looking at a women he
doesn't like, trying to make her look beautiful and silently hating her. It’s
kind of like the darker side of porn. Desire mingled with contempt. It degrades
the painter and the subject.

2. GOOD DINOSAURS, BAD DINOSAURS

The way Jurassic World degrades its subject is
just an extension of the way Jurassic Park degraded its subject but more
egregious, with less love and more desire. A dark and recessive gene, only
present in the first film, but brought to full expression in the 4th generation
by relentless imaginative in-breeding.

And as I will state again, for an artist, contempt
for the subject becomes contempt for yourself and contempt for the audience.

The Jurassic films have always played the trick of
pimping animals as monsters.

It's an old genre trick.

A. T-Rex roar. They probably didn't roar. Why do
they roar in the films? Because that’s what Alpha-Monsters do. We have learnt
this from fiction. The T-Rex looks like an Alpha-Monster, so it has to sound
like an Alpha-Monster. It must play the part we set for it. After all, we
created it did we not? And the money that made it came from the entertainment
industry. Why shouldn't it be our puppet?

B. Stegosaurus ass-up. As
shown here the Jurassic films actually addressed this issue and then went back. Real Stegosaurus
don’t feel heavy enough. Their tails would wag too much. They look like they
are mincing a little. It’s slightly girlish, change it. Also they are too
bright, grey them out.

C. Feathers. Feathers aren't scary. Feathers are
feminine. Scales are scary, skin is ok. Boys like smooth objects. If a top
predator is very bright and feathered we
would have to shoot them differently the colour arrangement of the film
would be different. And most importantly
- the logic of light and danger would be different from other films. It would tell the story differently to other
films, it would be different to other films. Change it. (We can add this to
the theme of men in their thirties making films about childish things afraid of
being seen as childish so sucking all the colour out of their films.)

D. Smaller Velociraptors. Obviously a no-goer.

I think in every case where Dinosaurs were
presented in a way other than our most current and most accurate estimation of
how they look they were :

- Masculinised. Less feathers, less bright, duller
colours, made to look more 'heavy', not to tread lightly. Smoother.

- Monsterised. Less human-indifferent animal
behaviour which you must work to understand. More human-focused behaviour that makes
sense according to popular story logic. This animal is 'good' this one 'bad'.
This one 'likes' this character, this other one 'dislikes' this character.

- Capitalised. Make them more like the other
films, that’s what people recognise. Make them more like the IP so we can
control the IP. Make it like a Trade-mark. Something we can own.

3. BUT ITS ALL SUPER IMAGINATIONS ANYWAY PATRICKS
WHY NO BLACK HOBBITSSSS

If this was just a normal genre film full of
inventive things it wouldn’t be that bad. So J.J.Abrams and Simon Pegg don't
actually like Star Trek that much? They'd rather it was something else? Well
fuck it, not much is lost, the good stuff still exists and you get some
fragments of beauty out of it.

But Dinosaurs aren't Star Trek, they are a deep
thing.

Reasons Dinosaurs matter

- Dinosaurs are from and are symbolic of, Deep
Time. The long reaches of time change the perspective of humanity and its
relation to the world in ways too total and powerful to cram into even a group
of essays. I will simply say that a world in which deep time exists has
fundamentally different moral implications than one in which it does not. I
will assert that our relationship to fictionally-recreated dinosaurs is like a
single very thin strand of our thinking about and relationship with the idea
of deep time. They are that time made real, in the minds eye at least. And they
are the most exciting, lively and life-imbuing avatar of that concept.

- The power shown in the fiction of the Jurassic
World series is a vague shadow of an entirely-real power we will almost
certainly have. We might not be able to resurrect Dinosaurs but we will be able
to do a LOT with genetics. In talking about the power of our technology over
life, Jurassic Park is talking about a really fucking important power that we
increasingly have and that we have almost no experience with thinking about.
ILM is just the herald of an In-Gen that will one day actually exist.

- In a wider sense, the films, and the Dinosaurs
which are the engines of the film are about the relation of technology to
nature and this relationship is probably the deepest and most important question
of human culture that exists today. What is the validity and beauty and moral
meaning of natural world? What should our relationship to it be? Is it a tool,
a toy, a work of art, a simple means to live? if it has meaning, where does
that meaning come from? What are our responsibilities?

- I will assert here that I think that Dinosaurs
are beautiful and have a moral meaning, inherent to themselves, both in their
actual previous existence in the real world, but also in the minds-eye are
works of art and living beings, though they live only as webs of digital light.

4. IMMORTAN PAT

So I think the essential mediocrity and failure of
imagination of the film betrays something more important than just a series of
fictional ideas.

Beauty matters and the beauty of a strange form is
a good thing to add to the world. A world in which Dinosaurs are feathered and
bright and act like fucking dinosaurs
and the people watching have to work to understand something outside
themselves, is a better world.

And, since the power and energy and life of the
Jurassic films derives entirely from
the existence and imagined re-construction of fucking Dinosaurs, not doing the
fucking Dinosaurs properly, turning them into toys, is an act of fucking
startling creative douchebaggery.

The films are based on the advances in our
knowledge of Dinosaurs and those advances are actually fascinating and good and
meaning-imbuing and they were ignored. This film is like a version of Apollo 13
where they get rescued by aliens.

Its weak and its awful and its morally wrong. They
had the power and the capacity and the
fucking mandate to make the world more interesting and beautiful and
accurate and wondrous all at the same time and they fucking
failed and failed wilfully.

Friday, 19 June 2015

Each Round :

1. Both parties make attack rolls. If
they hit, both make damage rolls. These are considered to have
happened at the same time.

2. After attack and damage rolls have
been made. The parties roll initiative. Whoever wins initiative can
enhance or avoid the effect of a blow.

3. Manoeuvring:

'Retreat!'
: If they got hit, the duellist may avoid the effects of an attack
roll by declaring a retreat. Their opponent may decide where and how
they retreat and can move them a number of feet equal to the
opposing attack roll. If this forces them over furniture and down
stairs they must pass a DEX test or fall.

'Press!'
: If they hit the duellist can also force their opponent back a
number of feet equal to the total of the attack roll. If this forces
them over furniture and down stairs they must pass a DEX test or
fall.

'Focus'
: Instead of attacking, the duellist concentrates on their enemies
weaknesses. Their next attack gets a +2 to hit and the damage is x
2. This bonus stacks. If a duellist concentrates every round for
six rounds and then hits, their attack gets a +7 to hit and does x 7
damage.

Anything
Else : The duellist can try anything else they want that doesn't do
or avoid damage or interfere directly with the other player. The DM
may require a roll of some kind to decide the result

Crits and Fumbles :

A crit can be used to :

Do x 2 damage.

Attempt a disarm or trip. The target must
make a DEX or STR test to avoid this.

A fumble usually means :

Dropping your weapon.

Falling over.

Giving your opponent a free attack.

The DM will decide which.

Crit & Fumble catastrophe : If one
duellist fumbles at the exact same time the other crits, the fumbler
ends up disarmed and at their opponents mercy.

Falling Over : A duellist that has fallen
can only get up the next round. If they are hit in that round they
can be disarmed. If they are already disarmed they are at their
opponents mercy.

Disarming : If
a duellist is hit by a critical and fails a DEX or STR test, or if
they are hit whilst fallen, they are disarmed. The successful duellist
can knock their opponents weapon a number of feet equal to the total
of their attack roll,

Winning and Losing :

An NPC duellist rolls a morale test at each of the
following points.

When first injured.

At half hit points.

When within 6 hit points of zero.

When they fumble a roll.

When disarmed.

Any round in which they take damage but deal
none.

If an NPC duellist fails three morale rolls in
a row they will submit. PC's may submit whenever they wish.

Sunday, 14 June 2015

Sir Thomas Malory wrote ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’ – the
core compilation and central text of the British Arthurian mythos. The speech
in this section appears nowhere in Malorys source texts, suggesting it’s
probably something he invented and inserted himself.

(All of this is from the Norton Critical edition,
edited by Stephen H. A. Shepherd. The line breaks, punctuation, spelling and
fonts are as close to that book as I can get them.)

Now turne we to Sir Launcelotthat rode with the damsel in
a fayre hygheway. “Sir,” seyde the damesall, “here by this way hauntys a knight
that dystressis all ladyes and jantylwomen, and at the leste he robbyth them
other lyeth by hem.”

“What?” seyde Sir
Launcelot, “is he a theff and a knight and a ravyssher of women? He doth shame
unto the order of knyghthode, and contrary unto his oth. Hit is pyte that he
lyvyth:

“But, fayre damsel, ye
shall ryde on before, yourself, and I woll kepe myself in covert; and yf that
he trowble yow other dystresse you, I shall be your rescowe and lerne hym to be
ruled as a knight.” So thys mayde rode on by the way a souffte amblynge pace –

And within a whyle com
oute a knight on horseback owte of the woode, and his page with hym; and there
he put the damesell frome hir horse – and than she cryed.

With that com Sir Launcelot
as faste as he might tyll he com to the knight sayng, “A, false knight and
traytoure unto knyghthode, who dud lerne the to distresse ladyes, damesels and
jantyllwomen?”

Whan the knight sy Sir
Launcelot thus rebukynge hym, he answered nat but drew his swerde and rode unto
Sir Launcelot. And Sir Launcelot threw his spere frome hym and drew his swerde,
and strake hym suche a buffette on the helmette that he claffe his hede and
necke unto the throte.

“For lyke as Terquyn
wacched to dystresse good knyghtes, so dud this knight attende to destroy and
dystresse ladyes, damesels, and jantyllwomen – and his name was Sir Perys
de Forest Savage.” “Now,
damesell,” seyde Sir Launcelot “woll ye ony
more servyse of me?”

“Nay, sir,” she seyde,
“at thys tyme, but allmyghty Jesu preserve you wheresomever ye ryde or goo, for
the curteyst knight thou arte – and mekyste unto all ladyes and jantylwomen –
that now lyvyth:

“But one thing, sir
knight, methynkes ye lak-

“Ye that ar a knight
wyveles, that ye woll nat love som mayden other jantylwoman. For I cowed never
here sey that ever ye loved ony of no maner of degree, and that is grete pyte:

“But hit is noysed that
ye love Queue Gwenyvere, and that she hath ordeyned by
enchauntemente that ye shall never love none other but hir, nother none other
damesall ne lady shall rejoice you – wherefore there be many in this londe, of
hyghe astate and lowe, that make grete sorrow.”

“Fayre damesell,” seyde
SirLauncelot, “I may not warne peple to speke of me what hit
pleasyth hem. But for to be a weddyd man, I thynke hit nat, for than I muste
couche with hir and leve armys and turnamentis, batellys and adventures. And as
for to sey to take my pleasaunce with paramours, that woll I refuse – in
prencipall for drede of God, for knyghtes that bene adventures sholde nat be
advoutrers nothir lecherous, for than they be nat happy nother fortunate unto
the werrys; for other they shall be overcome with a sympler knight than they be
himself, other ellys they shall sle by unhappe and hir cursednesse bettir men
than they be himself:

And so who that usyth
paramours shall be unhappy, and all thynge unhappy that is aboute them.”

[I feel I should translate, even a little, the
final paragraph because even for people who might actively enjoy reading old
English text it might be difficult to the point of annoyance. My translation is
inaccurate as to the exact meaning, as all translations must be:

“Fair damsel,” said Sir
Launcelot,
“I may not forbid people to speak of me what they please. But for me to be a
wedded man, I think it not, for then I must to-bed with and leave arms and
tournaments, battles and adventures. And as for to say to take my pleasure with
paramours, that well I refuse – in principal for dread of God, for a knight
that takes adventures should not be adulterer nor lecherous, for then he be not
lucky nor fortunate unto the wars; for either he shall be overcome by a lesser
knight than he be, other else he shall slay by mischance and his cursedness
better men than he be himself:

And so who that uses
paramours shall be unhappy, and all things unhappy that is about them.”]

Malory wrote this in prison. This is what he was
in for, again, quotes from the Norton Critical Edition:

“Aug. 23, 1451 Malory is charged at Nuneaton,
Warwickshire, in the presence of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, with
the following crimes:

·Attempted murder of the Duke of Buckingham, by
ambush with twenty-six other men, in the Abbot’s woods at Combe, Warwickshire,
Jan 4, 1450.

·“Rape” (raptus)
of Joan Smith, at Coventry, May 23, 1450.

·Extortion of money from two monks of Monks
Kirby, Warwickshire, May 31, 1450.

·Second “rape” of Joan Smith, and theft of £40’s
worth of goods from her husband, Aug.6 1450.

·Extortion of money from another monk of Monks
Kirby, Aug. 31 1450.

·Theft of seven cows, two calves, 335 sheep, and
a cart worth £22 at Cosford, Warwickshire, June 4, 1451.

·Theft of six does and infliction of £500’s worth
of damage in the duke of Buckingham’s deer park at Cauldron, Warwickshire, July
20, 1451.

·Escaping imprisonment at the house of Sheriff
Sir William Montford at Coleshill, Warwickshire (Malory swims the moat at
night), July 27, 1451.

·Robbery, with ten accomplices, of £46 in money
and £40’s worth of ornaments from Combe Abbey, July 28, 1451.

·Further robbery at Combe Abbey, with one hundred
accomplices, of £40 in money and five rings, a small psalter, two silver bells,
three rosaries, and two bows, and three sheaves of arrows.

By Jan. 27, 1452, and until July 1460. Held at
various prisons in London (Ludgate, King’s Bench, the Tower of London, and
Newgate) awaiting a trial that never happened. During this period Malory is
released on bail several times; during two of these periods of temporary
freedom he is implicated in further crimes:

·Theft of four oxen from Lady Katherine Peyton at
Sibbertoft, Nottinghamshire.

·Harbouring another alleged criminal, his servant
John, and attempting with him to steal horses in the environs of Great Easton,
Essex.

For the latter he is jailed at Colchester, Essex,
from whence he escapes, Oct. 30, 1454. He is recaptured and returned to prison
in London. Not long after the seizure of London by Yorkist forces in July 1460,
Malory is probably freed from prison.”

…

But he ends up back there, and probably dies
there.

This is probably the most interesting thing about
heroic fiction I have ever read. The Arthurian Myth is a deep dream of
harmonious order, written in prison in a time of chaos by a man who was
effectively an agent of chaos. A man who was effectively a D&D murder-hobo.

I am only about a third of the way in and this man
astonishes me. He feels like a fulcrum at the heart of British, and English
identity, this passionate, insanely romantic, violent, dreamy man who was
effectively a son of a bitch. Not one but two counts of rape and an attempted assassination.

This, to me, is the most psychologically
interesting writer in the English tongue.

Friday, 12 June 2015

Greebles are odd bits and bobs that model makers end up with. People deep in the microworld construction groove sometimes have bins and bins of greebles, they can pick them up by handfuls.

Which is exactly what they did in the late 70's and early 80's whenever they needed to add something to a model spaceship for a film, pick up a handful of greebles, sort through them for shapes that seemed appropriate and glue them on.

Greebling is a kind of three-dimensional detailing added to a model to seduce the eye into the illusion of scale.

Greebling is strange. It is like a kind of size-camouflage. It is like an abducted visual messenger. When we look at a cityscape from a roof, lots of tiny messengers run from the gaps between buildings, from the clustered chimneys, from the combination of roads and roofs all seen at once, and tell our brain 'this is a very big thing seen far away'. When we look at a cathedral, the little messages come from the detailing of the spires, the gargoyles, the layered shadows, the gaps between the huge stone blocks and say 'This is a single huge built thing that you are seeing all at once.' Your mind looks at something and without any conscious analysis, decides on a scale for it.

Greebling abducts, or hacks these messages and uses them to send lies about how big things are. The kinds of messages it steals, or fakes, tell you other things about the object you are looking at. They even tell you things about what will happen inside the object.

Here are some kinds of Greebling with some analysis of how they work:

HIVELIGHTING

Hivelighting is lights emitted from inside a massive form. The closest relations are to things like office buildings seen at night, or the windows of trains or planes. Hivelighting will usually be used to contrast with shadow moving across the form.

The 'friendliest' form of hivelighting is where liveable internal spaces can be seen inside the form like little rooms.

Hivelighting is difficult to consider on its own, it interacts with various forms of greebling in different ways.

AZTEKING

Azteking is the creation of the illusion of sheets of metal bent into shape around a curved form like those of a battleship or airliner.

Azteking is 'good' greebling. In a fiction in which multiple kinds of form contend and only one is Azteked, then that form is usually the one belonging to the heroes. The shapes it relates to are modern, (but not too modern), friendly and positive. They denote efficiency, civilisation, clarity, order, reasonableness and fluid human control. The most common reference is 20th century technology. If the agents of the fiction go inside this form it will be well lit and things will make sense, things will generally exist on a human scale.

When we imagine a form like this moving it is like a ship moving through the sea, strong, directed yet still fluid. The plates bind the identity and energy of the form within itself, it does not interpenetrate the space around it much, you are in or you are out, in is usually safe. Hivelighting is common with this kind of greebling.

Sub-Form : AZTEK-RIVITING

In this form, the smooth metallic plates of the azteking have noticeable rivets at their rims. This calls out to very early 20th century or 19th century forms. Iron instead of steel, steam instead of electricity. If something has plates but no very noticeable rivets then it probably runs on liquid fuel or nuclear power. It hums, possibly it roars but the transmission of its energies is smooth. If it has big rivets then it probably runs on coal and steam, maybe on an early oil motor. Its engine goes 'chug chug chug', you can feel and discern each individual rotation of the motor inside it. If it is a steam engine and very large then the chances are high that you will see the action of the engine during the fiction, its highly likely that some part of the fiction will take place inside the action of the engine. Aztek-Riveting carries even more of the impression of friendliness of azteking, it is slower, larger, heavier, more directly-comprehensible. If a person is in charge of running this engine that person will probably be friendly, blunt, simple and good.

INDUSTRIAL

Classic industrial greebling

Industrial greebling exists as an emotional and spatial mid-point between azteking and spiring.

The surface of an industrial form looks like nothing so much as a dense industrial landscape, like flying over a very large and varied factory. Every part of this surface is its own particular detail. It seems looking at it that everything on it has a particular purpose, that each is part of a machine and that each is doing something important. Nothing moves, the combination of the impression of purpose and spatial busyness and the fact that nothing can be seen happening makes the experience mildly alienating. Generally, the more clearly we can see the actual movements and embodies purpose of the forms the more ‘friendly’ and human they become. When they do not move or act they are silent forms, reminding us we do not understand what we see.

An Industrial form is less likely to carry hivelighting than an azteked form, unlike those it generally does not seem like a form full of light in which holes have been poked, instead it may have some 'window' lights but large areas will be dark. It may have some kind of lights that are rare on an azteked form, spire-lights or tower-lights, blinking red or green points on projections from the mass.

If we imagine going inside, there may be parts of it designed for human comfort, but it will probably not be a human-centred space. Like a factory it is there to do something very important that requires people, but is not for people. There might be cavernous vaults, long views, very tight crawlspaces and very dark areas.

Nevertheless, this form of greebling is still human-related, even if it is not human-centred, people can still live there.

Industrial greebling interpenetrates slightly with the space around it, its exact borders are not fully set, you can be next to it, near its skin, mixed up with its industrial projections, or inside it. It penetrates space in every direction.

If we imagine this shape moving it feels heavier and more relentless. It draws much of its sensory information from buildings and cityscapes and these things are not meant to move, so seeing them do so suggests power and indifference. It forces and thrusts its way into space, slow, looming, indifferent.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a relatively rare example of 'positive' industrial greebling.
The alien ship was well-lit, strange and very other but ultimately friendly and full of light.

SPIRING

Spiring intermeshes with industrial greebling at one end of its expression and with 3D XENOS and ULTRAGOTHIC at the other end.

A spired form is one with several very significant projections from its core mass. This form reminds us of cathedrals and churches more than anything else. A spired form interpenetrates with the outside space even more than an industrial form, instead of having an uneven 'skin' of industrial objects, it is more three-dimensional, you can imagine being in amongst the spires, within the controlling boundaries of the form yet still outside its inner self.

Spiring carries intimations of even more inhuman and indifferent purpose than industrial. It carries powerful intimations of authority. If the spires project along the direction of assumed travel then it suggests a questing aggression, if they cut across the direction of assumed travel then they increase the impression of indifferent power and heaviness.

ORGANIC

This is a rarely-used form of greebling which makes the surface of an object look like a natural form. This can range from skin, to bark to the surface of a shell, but in outer-space objects the chitin of an insect is most common. The scales of a fish, despite being familiar to almost anyone, are never used.
I cannot recall a single example of a scaled ship. Despite the fact that it is based on natural forms, an organic-seeming object in space is almost always used to denote SUPER-ALIENESS.

I think this is because we very rarely encounter any living thing bigger than us. When we do it is usually a mammal and the surfacing of skin is also almost never used in the construction of 'large seeming' forms. Insectoid forms, when massively increased in scale, produce an othering or alienating effect, they seem wrong. As our most distant but-still relatable form of life insects signify the alien to us.

(No-one has ever done techno-petals or alien flowers as greebling, which is slightly depressing.)

SQUID-ORGANIC

A sub-form of organic greebling is a surface created to use the complex bio-luminance of cephalopods as hivelighting. This is really rare and often very strange but also often very beautiful.
The combination of organic forms and light coming from within often denotes the 'wondrous other' rather than the 'devouring other'. Going inside this form will often result in some mystical shit, it may not be shown in the fiction but people who do it will come out changed.

DAMAGE

Damage is a fascinating kind of greebling that can create a powerful kind of emotional and cultural counterpoint to a form that has already been introduced in one particular way.

Combat-Damage.
If we see the combat occur then it can strip away the seeming surface of an object, enabling us to see 'within'. This powerfully increases a sense of scale if done well. It adds character, the smooth becomes rugged, the perfect, contained and fluid becomes irregular, interpenetrating and industrial.
It tells a story about the consequences of harm and also provides a new kind of scene or spatial set to play with: the gap-within-the-ship. A ship that has been scarred or damaged during the fiction automatically becomes about 10 times cooler from that point on. Physical and moral consequence intermesh in the penetration of the form.

Some forms show combat or action-damage from before the beginning of the fiction, they generally have more character and interest than forms that do not. The likelihood of a damaged space ship performing an exciting story-relevant manoeuvre or action is larger than that of a perfect space ship.

Time-Damage
Time damage is a particular form brought about, not by assumed violent actions either in, or before the fiction, but from imagined very-long reaches of time.

This is an extremely powerful storytelling technique and can be applied powerfully to 'smooth' forms to add visual interest.

It draws most powerfully from out observation of stellar objects like the moon and asteroids with noticeable impact damage, together with the decay of ruins and the slow failure of technology.

Time-Damage denotes time and in science fiction and ocean-based travel, time and distance are essentially the same thing, great time implies great distances. The weather-beaten ship has seen strange sights, the scarred black cylinder is space has been strange places, all these call out to a sense of the possible.

3D XENOS

ULTRAGOTHIC

I made these up. Well, I made everything here up but 3D Xenos isn’t really a kind of detailing its more a very particular kind of shape. Usually a regular complex three dimensional form, unlike anything you would use or hold in your hands, usually symmetrical along multiple axis and maybe with complex interpenetrating semi-interior spaces. This says ‘cool dangerous aliens that have their own stuff going on.

Ultragothic is just what 4ok ships do. Industrial meets spiring taken to 11.5.

Monday, 8 June 2015

Apparently I have lost the ability to do anything creative today so instead lets try this:

An episodic in-store 'event' project that united all the primary imagined worlds of ALL the OGL-Born OSR companies into one giant mega-adventure to be played weekly by people all over the globe using ANY of the those OSR systems in which the results of all of the efforts of these tiny groups are all reported and collated in some way to influence the final result. With content from ALL the major OSR bloggers and writers.

It would be a combination of the railroady in-store playalongs that WotC did for 4th ed, the giant event crossovers that Marvel and DC do where some giant fucking thing attacks the earth and everybodys book is about that for a month plus a shitload of publicity for the OSR in general.

The Giant Fucking Thing:

The Moons Dark Pavillions

The dark side of the moon is inhabited by an ancient empire of the Han Chinese who have merged with the shadow dimension, then without warning the moon begins to rotate, showing its dark face and the dark cities thereof, gigantic chains are lowered to the earth and roving shadow-cities are born where the touch the ground. Infiltrate or attack the cities or climb the chains and fight the moon.

or

Comets of the Crime God

The three comets holding the shattered fragments of the defeated God of Crime are meeting again in the night sky. As they grow closer to convergence criminals all over the world become more powerful, Empires and Governments invert, suddenly they are ruled from below. Social anarchy. The PC's are probably criminals, which explains their rapid levelling, but when it turns out that the Crime God intends to steal the sun and freeze the earth to death, will they be powerful enough to stop him?

or

Dead Lords of Jove

The ships of the Lich Lords Jove gather in the night sky. The solar system has been drained of resources, the Lich Captains need fresh crew, which means war on earth! Dead sorcerers from every period of earth history return in orbiting ships of bone and ice, they demand tribute and war! The PC's find a way to space to fight the threat, whilst dodging orbital fireballs and global megaconflict.

The Structure:

Like a Masks-Of-Nyarlathotep geographically separated but timetable-linked structure with semi-randomised conflicts and levelling points. A general structure decided centrally, both in its interacting narrative parts and its information architecture. Then separate briefs sent to each creative team.

Games Workshop used to do mass play events where people wold all play missions based on a particular battle and sent their results to the company and they would all be collated into one giant result.

Actually that would be insane for a mass-played RPG, even for this insanely conceived project.

XP couldn't be the same but you could have action-specific equivalents given in fractions of a level. I.e. reach this point and you advance 1/2 a level. Do this thing, kill this guy, steal this gem, and you advance 1/4 a level.

Monsters could be reduced to an ultra-simple stat line and minimal special rules. Magic items could be reduced to very simple test-only descriptions.

All you would need to do is persuade a bunch or tiny under-funded companies, each run by anarchistic weirdos, that it was a good idea and that they should combine funding and publicity for one gigantic unproven project.

But you might get good press from places like Boing Boing etc as the combination of small companies and global sandbox/modular yet-interacting gameplay and one giant story would sound pretty cool.

Really I just want to wipe those horrible 4th ed railroads from my mind and find an excuse to combine all good ORS blogs into one giant megathing that solves all game design, adventure structure and layout problems for ever.

Saturday, 6 June 2015

Spelljammer was good (Elves in undead bug-suits)
and also kind of shit (cheery Space-Gypsies). Instead, here is an LotFP-ised
version. lichJammer!

click for source

The rules of lichJammer are:

·The solar system and galaxy are exactly the same
size and shape as we currently understand them to be.

·Magic as described in the LotFP rulebook exists.

·Other than that, the rules of physics remain in
effect.

·Faster Than Light travel is impossible (other
than magic as described above.)

The background of lichJammer is:

Space is full of Undead. That's why earth isn't.
High level magic users mummify themselves and take to the stars. There are
undead out there from every era of human history. Akkadians, Han Chinese,
Pharoh's Sumerians, Maya, Inca, Celts etc.

This is what happened to all those ultra
high-level players from ancient games. It’s also the reason earth isn’t ruled
by immortal Lich Kings.

The assumed power differential between lichJammer
and standard LotFP is about twenty levels. Player Characters are considered to
start at about Level twenty, this is the entry level for lichJammer. If an
entity is less than roughly ten HD. That is, a group of less than ten skeletons
or two 5HD monsters, then you can just affect them without rolling anything.

It's like that samurai game where you don't have
to roll to kill peasants, you just declare that you are doing it and it takes
effect.

In a sense undeath is the perfect form of man in
which to explore space. You don’t need to breathe or eat. You can't be poisoned
by radiation. If you need to spend six months moving between planets in the
solar system then you just wait. (Arnold K had this idea first.)

The basic lichJammer is a segmented wooden
cylinder effectively open to the void (though it will have enclosed spaces they
will not be air-tight). A hollow tower of bone and petrified wood. Looks like
the spire of a gigantic wooden church, except full of skeletons. The segments
counter-rotate to provide the illusion of gravity when that is required. It’s
driven by vast Solar Sails. The sails are the skins of fantastic beasts. White
AngelSkin, translucent Shoggoth Skin, ribbed Dragon Wing etc.

The crews are skeletons, the officers are mummies.

The main weapons for ship-to-ship combat are
massed arrow-fire (surprisingly effective, in the void a flight of arrows can
travel hundreds of miles), catapults, magic and boarding actions. The barbs of
arrows are made from ice.

Mass is expensive, you only have so much and
captains won't expend it without good reason.

Mass is currency, time is also currency. There are
nth-level spells that take even a Lich months and months to jam in their dead
head. So if you take six months to move between the moons of Jove and Mars then
you have to decide what mega-spells you will memorise.

(A huge range of normal spells are just taken as
assumed abilities.)

Since most captains are Liches, sending masses of
low-level undead to attack an opposing ship wouldn't work, the enemy captain
would just take them over and double his or her crew. Instead you need to send
independent operators, entities the opposing Lich cannot simply or easily
control, this also makes them beings which cannot simply or easily control.

The available classes for lichJammer are:

Lich

Nazgul

Daemon

Auto-Golem

The Lich is a turbo badass spellcaster and
probably the Captain of the lichJammer. They are effectively the ships
artillery since spells will be more powerful and have a longer ranger than most
weapons in space. Like magic-users of all time they are shit-hot at range but
vulnerable at close range. You can choose which earth culture you come from,
maybe you were an Egyptian priest-king or a celtic druid mummified in a bog or
you ruled an Inca temple-city.

Nazgul is just shorthand for any Wight/Death
Knight/Skeleton Warrior/Unusually frisky mummy. Any human based embodied undead
that focuses on combat and is not a magic user. This is the Fighter equivalent.
You jump between lichJammers and beat things up. You are a hardy motherfucker.

Daemon. You are an actual (low level) Daemon. You
are probably a refugee from infernal politics. You have Daemon powers, can
shape change, fly, survive in space. You probably can't move as fast or with
the reliability as a lichJammer though, but at least you have some
manoeuvrability out there. Souls are currency to you. This one doesn’t have a
close equivalent in the basic classes but your abilities suggest a mix of Thief
and Bard. inherent abilities plus Charisma. You are less tough than a Nazgul
but get more bennies or skills. Not being undead you are the only member of the
crew that might get bored with the year-long journeys between moons.

Auto-Golem. You are a self-programming Golem. You
may be made of different materials. You can upgrade yourself by getting
different parts and adding them on. You are kind of a robot. A mixture of
Scotty and Commander Data, you can repair the ship and the skeletons. You might
be the bosun, in charge of ship defence, or you might launch yourself at the
enemy from a dorsal catapult and land on their superstructure, converting it
into mini golems. You can learn new skills and abilities by upgrading your
glyphware.

Setting:

Moons are more interesting than worlds. Worlds are
hard to get to. You need to put your lichJammer in orbit then Teleport to the
surface. If you don't know the target well you need to wait for clear weather
so you can see the spot you are teleporting to. Then to get back out you need
to Teleport back to your ship and hope nothing has gone wrong there while you
were away. Plus you can't take much with you. Plus if you fuck up a Teleport to
something in space and end up in the wrong place then you are just floating in
the void, maybe undergoing re-entry. Even for a Lich that’s a bad situation.
This is why lichJammers exist.

All the moons of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter have
individual cultures of either human undead, elementals, extra-dimensional
beings, or just weird as shit stuff. Asteroids and comets have their own weird
shit going on.

The skies of Jove are home to numerous airborne
empires but they can't get their Jovian gigafauna up into the void and you
can't get your lichJammer down into atmosphere so the moons is where you meet
and trade.

Everything in earths Solar System is exactly as
far away from everything else as it is in real life.

To get your lichJammer closer to the sun you have
to tack against the solar wind, slingshot yourself using planetary gravity or
catch a ride with a comet or asteroid heading the right way. The good slingshot
positions and useful comets are much sought-after and lichJammers fight to get
effective positions.

Space Combat:

This is a little like the age of sail in three dimensions,
with the sun the main source of 'wind'. Rounds take a day, you can try all
kinds of Patrick O'Brian bullshit like stealing the light from your enemies
sails and crap like that.

Interstellar lichJammer:

If you leave the system to go to another star it
can take hundreds of years. Relativity is in effect so even if you come back,
things will have changed a great deal, so each sun is like a little campaign of
its own without much connection to another.

Hyperdrives: I'm not sure if these should exist at
all but its possible you could take a detour through the skies of Hell, cast
Time Stop on yourself for a century while you travel.